Retro game prices on Ebay

[bigbacon]

Are there different versions of Golden Axe Warrior? When I added it to my collection at RFgeneration, someone messaged me about buying it, asking if it had the UPC sticker on back. It doesn't, and I noticed it doesn't have any SEGA of America copyright on it, just SEGA Enterprises LTD.

there were like 4 or 5 SMS games that were taken from the eurozone and brought over to usa for sale where they put a UPC sticker on the case over the label are sticker

there is debate about these all time but the game having it ups the price, sometimes quite a bit.

There was golden axe warrior, Spider man, strider, sonic 1, and I forget what else. (may have only been those 4)

Sonic is the biggie if it has the UPC.

other than that sticker, there is no difference between the USA release and the Euro release of these games. they even have the horizontal manuals.


As for prices.....

Anything Nintendo is astronomical, for the most part. Sega stuff, while going up, is still very cheap in my eyes.

Most US SMS games can be found complete for less than 10 or 15 bucks, hell, out of my complete USA SMS game collection there is only one game I paid more than 75 bucks for. Try that on any other system.

[Tanooki]

Bacon it's just those and you're right. Sonic is the nastiest. Funny story I bought Sonic 1 from the UK, ended up of all things getting the US UPC version for like $10. When I got that around 2 years back the two most recent ebay paid sales, one from within the US in fantastic shape was barely shy of $1K, and one as nice but going to the US from the UK was a little over $500. ALL FOR THE STICKER. The others don't come near (GAW, Spiderman and Strider) but there is a premium.

I sold mine when I got rid of the SMS and I worked a deal with a guy through hours of chitchat over ebay internal mail as I had it OBO. My sticker was missing like 15% of it and it had (dead) mold and water damage. I still got $300 for it and other than the jacked sticker mine was very nice too, so even hosed up it was worth a lot.

Also you're a little off, not everything Nintendo is bad. Most of the N64 stuff is lower priced still, few of them are in that original $50 retail and higher club for loose carts. The DSI mini set (has like 4 games only for it) is stupid cheap even sealed, and if you ignore Jack Bros almost all the Virtual Boy US releases are cheap too. What is bad is the popular stuff -- NES, SNES, and even the Gamecube where a good bit is rising in value sadly. Everytime some fools get into wanting to monetizing something the cancer spreads.

[SparTonberry]

DSi set is probably cheap because it's only four games (3 NA, 1 EU) and I don't think any of them are highly desirable games either.

[calgon]

I'll echo what everyone has already said. Case in point: I remember feeling I paid too much for my copy Dragon warrior 3 for NES at 15 dollars in the early aughts. Can remember late nights on irc with members of the NES scene complaining that Little Samson was getting outrageously overvalued at upwards of $40 in price. Game regularly goes for $500 now on ebay.

[chriswy27]

Now that I have a real job I have been buying all the older games I wanted as a kid. Probably many others doing the same.

[Tanooki]

Sure people of the era, then you have the younger exposed kids/adults and then the hipsters who follow the fads to look cool. The problem is on the whole a lot of them are impatient and stupid, want it now, don't bother to research or go for a good price and it causes the ebay pissing match of always trying to get $5 more than the next guy and then we're where we are now.

[Gentlegamer]

Just browsing some things today, and shaking my head at all the BIN listings showing a "sale price" of a dollar or two off.

I hope ebay comes to its senses and reinstates listing fees for unsold auctions.

[Zthun]

You know, unless your a hardcore collector that is just trying to fill up shelf space, flash carts solve this problem. You don't need to worry about the condition, you don't need to worry about the battery since the save is on the cart, and you don't have to worry about price fluctuations.

It's a good investment. $120-$150 or so for a cart that you can put anything you want on is a good deal considering the prices of today's classic games.

[RetroCynical]

Definitely supply and demand just as stated by others before. I've noticed some games that got jacked up in price gradually decrease a little. A great example would be Chiller for NES. At first it was somewhere between 30-50 on ebay then jumped between 60-100 and has gone back down again because though it was a rare find before, ebay all of a sudden became flooded with people selling copies of the game.

[Rickstilwell1]

The thing sniping does sometimes is makes a person change their mind on how much they are willing to spend. Especially if there is only one listing of the item the person is looking for and time is running out. It causes people to bid higher out of desperation.

I have also noticed that on auctions that have no bids, it is still best to snipe because once somebody sees that another person is willing to buy the item, all of a sudden other people want it too. If you leave it with no bids till near the end, it makes other potential buyers think "oh nobody is willing to pay this seller's asking price, I'll wait till they relist it for cheaper"

[WelcomeToTheNextLevel]

I no longer collect very much for this very reason. I collect from retro game stores more than eBay but still, what a game goes for on eBay is going to likely be the range that it will be selling for at a retro store. That and my favorite retro game store closed in July 2009, so probably 80+% of my retro collection was bought before July 2009. There is another retro game store where I live, but it is overpriced. Probably because it's the only retro game store in town now. At least the selection is awesome though. But in the 2006-2009 period when I got most of my games, it seems like a lot of them were half the price they go for now. We probably paid around $5,000 in total for my whole retro collection. It's about 600 retro games and about 39 retro systems. I wouldn't be surprised if it's worth over 8 grand now. But I love my collection too much to sell it.

[Tanooki]

Wow woke the dead didn't ya? Been 13 months and it was my post. I'll say this much in that time frame. Other than 1 game in Sept 2013, I gave up buying old 8/16bit games actively July of that year. Since that time I've kept up on prices, but I've just grabbed famicom stuff, and gb/gbc/gba stuff (gb/c recently in the last month alone.) I went towards lego, manga, and straight up avoided 8/16bit Nintendo carts because of things and I'm happier for it. There are a few I've picked up since then but they've been local deals if I find them and there was the CIB Civilzation on SNES last year on this board and that's really it. Once you realize how bad it is, and you decide to stop playing into other peoples petty scalping games it gets a lot less stressful and more fun. You'll find there's plenty on the shelf to screw around with, and you'll find enough of it just sucks or isn't worth the time on a matter of taste, and that can be sold for better things, like my high end gaming laptop I got last December.

ebay isn't the problem, it's just a symptom of a bigger issue of non-gamers seeing dollar signs and hosing others over who don't know better or just don't care because they have something the buyer wants and they'll fight other like minded people into blowing money. Same reason with the retail shops, if there weren't enough suckers, they'd be forced to lower prices or go out of business too. Just accept it, grab anything that rarely pops up on a deal, give up, or take the beating, as there's no real other options.

[WelcomeToTheNextLevel]

I don't know, but it's a bunch of rancid bullshit. It seems like every time an original SG-1000 is on eBay it's more and more expensive. I've seen them for over $1,000 recently. I remember not getting one in the mid-late 2000s because they were $200 or so back then if you could find one. Now their prices are out of control. The SG-1000 II models are still available under $300, they seem to be slightly more expensive usually than the one I got at $233 in November 2011 but nothing ludicrous. An SG-1000 shouldn't cost as much as a working 15 year old car. I'm glad I collected a lot in the mid-late 2000s. Fuck this price bubble. Wasn't the 2000s the best time to collect.

[sfchakan]

No, the 90s were the golden time. No one gave a fuck and the majority of gamers "traded up" every generation causing a huge supply of retro stuff to flood second-hand stores, yard sales, gas stations, residences, warehouses, farmhouses, henhouses, outhouses and doghouses.

Now every Joe Blow thinks they're going to build a museum, shrine, or bitchin man cave and has to have every single game possible. So they're throwing money (or credit) at gobbling everything up.

It's fairly retarded since the majority of things are emulated well enough now to give you your nostalgia fix on everything from cellphones to tablets to laptops to desktops. One decked out computer with some good harddrives would save shitloads of money and space... but, hey, whatever.

I just can't wait for the day the johnny come latelies lose their interest and flood the market again. Only the truly rare or sought after games will be worth anything at all then.

[Tanooki]

Hell no the 90s and the 00s were, but more so the 90s. If you're getting into anything Nintendo cart based from the 20th century (gameboy aside), Sega oddball out of country stuff, other obscure systems (adventurevision for one), you're stone cold screwed if you want to do it now. All the scalpers trash are gobbling up stuff like it's their job to sell anything out there to you for an ever increasing higher price trying to outdo the next twit on ebay and amazon. The stuff I got in the 90s and early 00s and for the prices I paid would give a 201X's collector a woody just thinking of the stuff I had and how little it cost. Sure you had a few rare items throughout the 2000-2009 range that may have hit 3 digits, but it was few and far between, and so many of these so called faux rares and the few that really are weren't up there, definitely not in the $300-1000+ range you'll find in 2011-present. The problem is there's a still ever increasing pile of impatient fools and dolts with deep pockets (or no financial priorities in their lives) who just keep paying the piper and scooping up the stuff so they can make dumb online videos, blogs, and camera shots of their mighty wall of games and related merchandise. I mean it's nice to see when people find something truly obscure or cool, but the proliferation of it is giving way too much recognition and making stuff spiral out of control.

As he said just above, can't wait for the johnny come lately types to just get bored, sell off and wander off to the next thing to wreck. He's right, the only honestly rare stuff that has thousands, hundreds, or even dozens or less copies need to be priced how they are, but the stuff into the tens of thousands up into the hundreds of thousands that go for so much not only need but will crash. It happened with comics, sports cards, and other stuff. When the interest from the foolish and crooks vanishes, things change dramatically but some will never be the same again since the true rares are not unknowns now and they'll stay bloated, but at the least no one will be getting $30 for a Super Mario game cart at that rate. I've said it before, I quit, 2 years ago now buying stuff on ebay and the rest. I trade, find it cheap locally, or I don't bother as I'd rather keep up to date but not have my wallet raped. I found recently gameboy never got whacked with the ugly stick so I got back into that and it's fun.

[bb_hood]

Most of the N64 stuff is lower priced still, few of them are in that original $50 retail and higher club for loose carts.

Well, in terms of rarity N64 games have been overpriced for a long time. Game like Mario64, Mario Kart 64, Donkey Kong64, and Zelda ocarnia are some of the most common games on the planet. There are very few N64 games that are actually rare and hard to find, especially compared to nintendo nes which has tons of rares.

Can remember late nights on irc with members of the NES scene complaining that Little Samson was getting outrageously overvalued at upwards of $40 in price. Game regularly goes for $500 now on ebay.

Well, Little Samson at 40$, that would have been a long time ago. While it is not the rarest of nes games, it is hard to find. Mainly because of word of mouth, everybody wants a copy. For many people ebay is the only place to really snatch up a copy. The same goes for alot of the rarer games, people trying to complete collections are forced to pay ebay prices.
I think ALOT of it is speculation also, I think people buy carts like samson, flintstones 2 and other pricey rares because they think they will become astronomically valuable in the future, but that is very unlikely. People see the price jump and think it will continue but most likely it wont. Not many people are willing to pay even close to 500$ for samson despite what completed listings show.

[PizzaKat]

Sellers fees are miniscule. They don't gouge like Ebay. Seeing their site from awhile it was no difference in price from Ebay. Looking now the same bullshit again.

[Arkanoid_Katamari]

Bacon it's just those and you're right. Sonic is the nastiest. Funny story I bought Sonic 1 from the UK, ended up of all things getting the US UPC version for like $10. When I got that around 2 years back the two most recent ebay paid sales, one from within the US in fantastic shape was barely shy of $1K, and one as nice but going to the US from the UK was a little over $500. ALL FOR THE STICKER. The others don't come near (GAW, Spiderman and Strider) but there is a premium.

I sold mine when I got rid of the SMS and I worked a deal with a guy through hours of chitchat over ebay internal mail as I had it OBO. My sticker was missing like 15% of it and it had (dead) mold and water damage. I still got $300 for it and other than the jacked sticker mine was very nice too, so even hosed up it was worth a lot.

Also you're a little off, not everything Nintendo is bad. Most of the N64 stuff is lower priced still, few of them are in that original $50 retail and higher club for loose carts. The DSI mini set (has like 4 games only for it) is stupid cheap even sealed, and if you ignore Jack Bros almost all the Virtual Boy US releases are cheap too. What is bad is the popular stuff -- NES, SNES, and even the Gamecube where a good bit is rising in value sadly. Everytime some fools get into wanting to monetizing something the cancer spreads.

I don't think NES is that bad, right now. Sure, theres enough games on the system that are ridiculous now, but u can still collect the bottom 3 or 400 games on the system without spending that much money. Most still sell for less than $20, and a lot of the real "essentials" like Mario, Mega Man, Metriod, Zelda, Contra, etc. are still selling for around this price, like the N64. I buy 90% of my games at flea markets and stores cuz then u can actually deal with people, and most retro game stores have somewhat fair prices. Somewhat. SNES and Gamecube seem to be getting out of hand right now, where any game thats had even the smallest attention is selling for around $30-$50. Ridiculous.

[Arkanoid_Katamari]

Ultimately, I don't think game collecting is thaaat expensive a hobby, if u know where to shop, most of ur games can be picked up for less than $10, so who can really complain with that? It's only a small fraction of games that have made those monetary leaps on Ebay.

[DigitalKarma]

wow $300 for a copy of Daytona usa for the Sega Saturn when it only cost less than $3..lmao

Is someone actually stupid enough to buy it?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/Video-Games-...nesales&_sac=1